1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for embedding software developer comments in source code of computer programs.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Computer systems today are capable of executing a larger number and more complex computer program instructions in a computer program. Computer programs today may include many thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of source code. From time to time, developers insert comments in such source code describing the code, its functionality, its unique properties, and so on, so that other software developers reviewing the code more fully understand the code. Current developer comments in source code, however, include only textual comments. Textual comments have some drawbacks. In many cases, for example, such comments are kept short in length to reduce clutter in the source code. Such terse comments may inadequately describe the source code. Further, even when the textual comments are of a greater length, text is generally less explanatory than figures, drawings, images, videos, audio, screen casts—recorded videos of user interactions with GUI software, or other multimedia based content.